1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a head suspension for supporting a slider in a disk drive such as an external storage device of a computer, a load beam which is a part of the head suspension, and a method of manufacturing the load beam.
2. Description of Related Art
Disk drives such as magnetic disk drives and optical disk drives are widely used as storage devices of computers. Among the disk drives, a magnetic disk drive or a hard disk drive (HDD) has a head suspension for supporting a magnetic head slider (hereinafter simply referred to as “slider”).
The head suspension includes a base plate, a load beam, a flexure attached to the load beam, and the like. The load beam supports a gimbal which is a plate spring. A front end of the gimbal forms a tongue serving as a slider mount. To the tongue, a slider is attached with, for example, an adhesive. The slider is slightly pushed with spring force toward the surface of a magnetic disk arranged in the magnetic disk drive.
The periphery of the tongue at the front end of the gimbal is mostly cut from the body of the gimbal. The slider on the gimbal is supported with a dimple formed at a front end of the load beam. The dimple has a convex curved surface to support the slider with the tongue of the gimbal interposing between the dimple and the slider that is adhered to the tongue. A barycenter of the slider is adjusted to the dimple.
When the magnetic disk is rotated, a fluid dynamic pressure effect occurs to slightly float the slider from the surface of the magnetic disk against load applied to the slider by the load beam. At this time, the dimple functions as a fulcrum to freely change the attitude of the slider in tangential and normal directions with respect to a track of the magnetic disk.
The slider opposes the dimple with the tongue interposing between them. To properly control the attitude of the slider, it is very important to position the barycenter of the slider just on a vertex of the dimple, as explained in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2004-86984.
It is very difficult, however, to adjust the barycenter of the slider to a vertex of the dimple.